In today's knowledge-based economy, an organization's data is one of its more important assets, and many organizations seek to protect, track, monitor and audit access to their data. Many data-processing applications accordingly offer a set of data tracking capabilities, such as maintaining change history for data records. Change history typically includes the time, responsible user, and a set of data values for every change. Another type of data control is called access control, in which users are allowed or denied read or write access to certain records or record sets.
Modern organizations use multiple data-processing applications, each such application managing a subset of an organization's data. Sometimes such applications offer a set of data management controls, where these data controls usually differ in their interface but generally provide similar functionalities that may be related to similar data management controls or aspects. Moreover, many data processing applications use a user management system in order to supply data access controls to organizations. These user management systems are also different in their interface but provide fundamentally similar functions. Accordingly, an organization may be forced to manage a (possibly large number) of applications in order to enforce data access or management control.